Linux MolBio Software

In article <4ikpgc$igg at usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>,
gilbertd at sunflower.bio.indiana.edu (Don Gilbert) wrote:
> I've had an easier time getting Solaris installed on "standard" IntelPC
> hardware, and I've spent less money on it than on Linux
> (linux is "free", if you have plenty of time & help to spend in
> place of money).
I'd have to agree with this (especially the HELP part), but for example,
UC Irvine also provides the Slackware distribution via NFS (thanks,
Sinclair Fleming).
On the other hand, help via the net and/or the local linux guru) is at
least as fast (and usually closer to the truth) than from a commercial
tech-support line.
If you want to install it over the net, you make 2 floppies while in DOS,
reboot using those floppies and you install via the NFS - I've done
multiple installs this way on different hardware and IMHO it is easier to
install this way than MS Windows as well as being vastly more stable, etc,
etc, etc. The LARGE difference is that you DO HAVE TO BE CAREFUL with
some hardware choices. Linux is supported by the net community and
therefore some (especially brand new) hardware is not supported. For MOST
hardware (standard IDE, SCSI HDs, tapes, ethernet cards; getting XWindows
to work can be a problem, although someone recently wrote an autoconfig
script that seems to make MOST installs go relativley painlessly), it DOES
work, and the Linux HOWTOs are a shining example of how to write
documentation.
>> I will be providing a Linux binary of SeqPup, as I do now for
> Solaris X86, as soon as I get more of Linux installed. Note I had to spend
> $150 just to get the Motif libraries to develop this. This comes
> standard w/ Solaris, which cost me less than $100 complete.
This is a very good deal!! I wasn't aware of how cheap it was..
(From another thread, Don also wrote:)
>The price I got of $99 is for educational institution discount --
>ask about that. Compilers (C/C++, Fortran),
>if you want Sun's commercial quality instead of Gnu, are available
>for an extra $99, I believe.
This is also an incredibly good price! Even if you can afford the
hardware, SGI's price for the varsity pack of compilers etc, is
$1000/year.
*** Note Order of Magnitude differences, SGI ***
(altho, some would say that GNU is better than commercial quality :); and
my experience has been (altho not as wide as Don's) that porting system to
system is easier with gcc than with the 'commercial compilers', if only
because they share the same code base. gcc's performance seems to be
about equal or better to the commercial ones as well.
Cheers
Harry
--
Harry J Mangalam, Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, UC Irvine,
Irvine, CA, 92717, (714) 824-4824, fax (714) 824 8598
http://hornet.mmg.uci.edu/~hjm/hjm.html
Computational Biology..SGI..Woodworking..Bicycling..Linux..WWW